MOSIDEO

Project summary

Petroleum activity is currently Norway’s largest industry, and further development in the Arctic is expected to bring new potential for local value creation and development. Sea ice presents a novel challenge to planning, development, and production in the area. License blocks nominated for the 23rd licence round lie in seasonally ice-covered areas.

The petroleum industry on the Norwegian continental shelf aims to be a world leader in ensuring environmental soundness, calling for the interaction of oil with sea ice, its fate, transport, and detection to be understood.

“Microscale interaction of oil with sea ice for detection and environmental risk management in sustainable operations” (MOSIDEO) is a research project aiming at understanding the fundamental science of oil behaviour in the sea ice pore space through experiments, observation, and modelling.

Pore-scale understanding of the fate of oil in sea ice is limited due to

challenges associated with investigating a material close to its melting point, and with immiscible oil-brine displacement processes in complex pore networks.

MOSIDEO will develop methodology and equipment that overcomes these challenges. Intercomparisons with different tools will show potential and limits of alternative methods of pore scale investigations, and interpretation of radar signals in the context of oil distribution will be investigated.

MOSIDEO will perform coordinated experiments and modelling at the both pore scale and effective medium scale to find formulations best suited to predict oil entrapment, migration and release in and from sea ice.

WP0

lead: Norut Narvik

WP1

lead: NTNU

WP2

lead: UAF

WP3

Effective medium analysis and stakeholder applications

lead: Norut Narvik

WP4

Radar detection

lead: Norut Tromsø

WP5

Large-scale laboratory experiments

lead: Norut Narvik

Primary Objective

The primary objective of the research project “Microscale interaction of oil with sea ice for detection and environmental risk management in sustainable operations” (MOSIDEO) is to advance our knowledge of the interactions between oil and sea ice pore structure and develop parametrised description of oil behaviour and its influence on radar signals.